Amy Westerman

Profile

Amy completed her MPhys degree at the University of Leeds in 2013 with a final year project working on the position dependent effects of non-magnetic impurity delta layers. She continued this work along with commissioning equipment for use in low temperature transport during the summer of 2013 in her role as a research assistant. She began working on her PhD project with the group in September 2013, supervised by Prof. Bryan Hickey and Dr. David Williams at Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory. She spent the first year of this project studying the effect of 5d transition metal delta layers on the resistivity and ordinary Hall coefficient of thin Cu films, before beginning work on the ferrimagnetic insulator YIG.

Since then, Amy has specialised in measuring the electrical transport properties of ultrathin Pt films deposited on various YIG surfaces and also when doped with a dilute amount of localised magnetic impurities. She has studied phenomena such as weak localisation, the Kondo effect, the anomalous Hall effect and the spin Hall magnetoresistance, among other magnetotransport phenomena, in order to disentangle the complex interplay of effects present at the YIG/Pt interface. Her thesis is entitled 'Extrinsic spin-orbit scattering in thin films' and is due to be submitted August 2019.

Research interests

Amy has been working within the Condensed Matter Physics group at the University of Leeds, with research interests in extrinsic spin-orbit scattering, magnetic insulators, spin Hall magnetoresistance and related areas of spintronics.

Qualifications

• MPhys (Hons) in Physics from the University of Leeds, First Class
• LabVIEW Core 2
• British Sign Language, Level 1

Research groups and institutes

• Condensed Matter